


Day by Night

by Owlship



Series: Riding the SkyTrain [9]
Category: Transformers: Cyberverse
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Emotional Obliviousness, F/M, Improper Use of Subspace/Transwarp/Unspace, Injury, Making stuff up about Skywarp's Teleportation Abilities, Other, Seeker Trines, Size Difference, Size Kink, Sticky Sexual Interfacing, and reacts by being an idiot, skywarp has a very bad day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:48:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27217438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Owlship/pseuds/Owlship
Summary: Thundercracker just stares at her like she's a colossal idiot when she explains this to him, which takes a little lift out from under her wings."You're an idiot," he says."No I'm not," Skywarp replies, even though he tends to only call her dumb when she reallyhasbeen dumb, unlike Screamer who considers everyone practically a drone compared to his own (debatable) intelligence.
Relationships: Astrotrain/Skywarp (Transformers), Skywarp/Starscream/Thundercracker (Transformers), Skywarp/Thundercracker (Transformers)
Series: Riding the SkyTrain [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1926703
Comments: 6
Kudos: 23





	Day by Night

**Author's Note:**

> We're here!!!! I'm hoping to write one more section after this as sort of a wrap-up/epilogue thing, but this part covers most of the Plot I had in mind. Hopefully it was worth the build up. :)

The first think Skywarp does when the news hits the intra-Decepticon datanet is comm Thundercracker, duh. Megatron has fallen in battle- not deactivated, or at least not _yet_ , pending the Constructicons' ability to piece him back together- and Screamer isn't even there to gloat and declare himself the new Emperor of Destruction or whatever, so of course she's going to bring it up with her other trinemate.

Thundercracker replies with a plea to help him keep the air force from cannibalizing itself; apparently Thrust has decided that, with the general chaos erupting now that Megatron is potentially extinguished, he's going to try and take her role as Air Commander.

Skywarp is in her alt mode, and so can't even properly emote her disdain at the very idea. A conehead, leading the seekers? As if.

Once she's reassured Thundercracker that she's on her way (pointedly not saying a word about warping in) she sends another comm, this one to Astrotrain. ::Looks like your Megatron sucks tailpipe after all!::

There's no reply, but she doesn't expect one. The report said that Astrotrain took the Other Megatron through a portal, and his comm doesn't work when he's in unspace.

The dread that had been gripping her is gone, though it galls her that it was indeed the Autobots who succeeded in defeating the Other Megatron. There's still a chance she's in for smelting if Soundwave questions her and finds out she knew the Autobots were going to attack, but at the time it happened she was on the other side of the planet like her patrol route dictated so it's not like there's much reason to be suspicious of her inactivity during the attack. Plus, she heard that the Autobots were planning to take the Matrix, which they failed at. So really all her intel was wrong anyway.

She's glad Astrotrain urged her to stay away, even if she feels like a coward for knowing about a fight and not being ready to join it. But because of it she can truthfully say she was doing all she could to get there in time once the alert hit general comms but simply was unable to, rather than balancing the need to get the Matrix away from Megatron and not otherwise betraying her faction.

When she does arrive back at base, thrusters glowing with the heat of being pushed so hard, it's to find the expected chaos. Soundwave is busy making sure Megatron doesn't get assassinated on the med slab, and without Starscream to viciously grab as much power as possible, every other idiot with aspirations is vying for control.

Skywarp is plenty happy to let the grounders and miscellaneous rabble extinguish themselves, and she'll even overlook the other flightframes in the air force squabbling over their rankings; she only cares about making sure her seekers don't get any ideas. Screamer would have her helm mounted on a vibro-spear if he onlines and finds out she lost him control over them in his absence.

Thankfully it's not too hard, she mostly just has to dent Thrust's ugly conehead in far enough he'll probably need a whole new helm, and toss around a few other ambitious seekers until they get the point. Yeah, her greatest skillset lies in flying and warping, but that doesn't mean she's unable to hold her own in a scrap or anything. Especially with Thundercracker at her side, backing her up with his solid presence and a few well-placed sonic booms.

When the chaos of the air barracks quiets late in the night and Skywarp is starting to reluctantly think she'll have to actually approach the rest of the ranking officers to find out how things are shaking out with the chain of command, Thundercracker puts his hand on her forearm and says, "Oh, and uh, sorry about Astrotrain."

"Huh?" she replies, because as far as she knows there's nothing that needs to be sympathetic about.

"The unspace thing," he says, and then when she only stares at him blankly, "I forgot to send you the data packet, slag. Ratchet was talking about it before we kicked them back over the wall."

Her comm pings and she accepts the data, which is just an audio clip of Ratchet saying- something about unspace, and instability, and " _He'll disappear within a cycle_."

"What?" Skywarp says, struggling to wrap her processor around the words. "But Astrotrain's been in unspace plenty of times, it's how the multiverse drive works."

"He said he was planning to stay there, though," Thundercracker says with a shrug. "I guess the Autobots had this happen after a space bridge accident, if you stay too long... You vanish."

All the dread and anxious anticipation she'd been feeling before wells back up in her now, nearly enough to glitch out her co-processor. The only difference is this time it's aimed at Astrotrain, and not her own survival.

There's a very good chance the Autobots are lying, obviously, but- really, why would they? To make sure the Decepticons don't try to retrieve the Other Megatron? Fat chance of _that_ happening, considering he declared they were all useless and was going to terminate them like he'd done to his original dimension. Just like Astrotrain warned her would happen, Skywarp thinks with a twinge of guilt; she hadn't really believed him.

She opens her intake to say that she'll let him know, but of course his comm doesn't work when he's not actually _in_ this dimension, and she clicks off her vocalizer without saying anything.

"Are you okay?" Thundercracker says, hand resting against her shoulder, just between pauldron and vent, a concerned frown growing on his faceplate.

"Yeah," she says, hearing the stiffness in her own voice. "Of course! What a waste of good spike, though."

He doesn't look convinced, and she tamps down on the trine bond before it can betray the turmoil in her processor. She should be fine, should shrug and move on to contemplating a new berthpartner or just focus on Thundercracker before he feels neglected, but knowing that Astrotrain is going to be deactivated and there's nothing she can do _sucks_.

She likes him, likes him far more than she usually warms up to fragbuddies. Probably because he hasn't once flinched at the kinky things she's asked for, and doesn't ask too many favors of his own either- at least, not ones she's turned off by. And he kept her betrayal a secret, when any sane Decepticon would have turned her in without a second thought. And because he goes along with her practical jokes instead of getting frustrated and demanding she stop, and flew around with her in zero-g after she got weird instead of kicking her to the curb, and looks so stupidly happy every time he gets to use his train alt that it was satisfaction enough surprising him even before the fragging.

And maybe just a little bit because she can still access the sense-memory of his code filling her RAM from the hardline they'd shared, the warm buzz when they merged sparks, like it was almost more intimate than just the messing around it really was.

"I've got a lot still to do," Skywarp says, "You can keep things on the ground here, right?"

"If you're sure," Thundercracker says, obviously reluctant to take her word for it but apparently not up to fighting her on it.

"Yep," she says flippantly, and tosses a wave at the dented forms of Ramjet and Dirge tending their trine-leader as she marches out into the hallway towards the command center.

The command center is currently hosting a brawl between Motormaster and Wildrider, Drag Strip watching like he gets to claim the victory as his own, whichever way it goes. Skywarp flicks her ailerons and heads towards the repair bay instead, but it's blockaded by Bonecrusher and she's not really invested enough in a status update to tangle with him.

She wanders more-or-less aimlessly after that, struggling to get her processor to stop dwelling on the unfairness of Astrotrain's imminent demise. It's not like she can even do anything about it- she can't get a message to him, and even if her teleportation ability was currently stable enough to try, she really doesn't think she could manage to jump to unspace.

But, she realizes as she in-vents the cool night air outside, she doesn't have to rely on her outlier ability.

Astrotrain told her all about the dimensional ray once keeping it secret no longer mattered, bragging about how he'd modified the schematics for his own multiverse drive to turn it into a weapon for Megatron. It's a huge piece of equipment, one she has definitely _not_ seen installed around the base, which means it's still out there in his workshop most likely.

She can use it to get to unspace and warn him about the danger, and then he won't extinguish. Even if he leaves for another dimension rather than return to this one (with her, her traitorous processor whispers), it's better to know he won't just _vanish_ because unspace is too unstable to stay in.

Skywarp isn't really used to second-guessing her decisions. Sometimes they're fantastic, sometimes they nearly get her deactivated, but on the whole she leaves the overthinking to Thundercracker and Screamer. She can't exactly comm him about this though, not when he'll probably lecture and ask her why it's even occurred to her to try doing this for some random mecha anyway, so there's no one to make her stop and think about potential consequences as she flies to Astrotrain's workshop out in the middle of nowhere.

The dimensional ray is exactly where she last saw it, powered down and aimed at the floor.

She's not familiar with the controls, but Astrotrain hasn't programmed anything fancy in as far as she can tell from a quick sweep of the system. There's no timer, so she has to input commands to have the ray swing around on its axis until it's pointed at her where she stands on the edge of the oversized computer console. (Not oversized, really, just scaled for a mech several times larger than the average- and it still strikes her as kind of sad, that only this one place is really built with him in mind)

The ray fires, and Skywarp vanishes into unspace.

It is so much worse than she remembers from last time, half her sensors gone offline from lack of input and the others reading nothing but junk data, gyros telling her conflicting reports about whether she's upside-down or not while her optics struggle to identify any landmark to use as orientation in the murky, shifting dimension. And worst of all is the sharp throbbing from her spark, so much more painful now than before when it was barely a twinge.

Faced with the reality of unspace, she might have a little bit of regret over jumping in helm-first.

Well, she thinks, she's here now. Might as well start looking for Astrotrain. She hails him on comms, but the message won't even send- no receivers to bounce the message off, only her own short-range radio antenna which is barely good for much distance, so the signal fizzles out and the comm aborts.

"Astrotrain?" she calls out loud, expecting her voice to echo and disturbed when it's merely swallowed up. Skywarp fires up her thrusters and picks a random direction. "Astrotrain, you here?"

What if he's already vanished? She can't teleport her way back out, just the thought of activating her warp drive aches deep inside her chassis. Fear quakes through her at the possibility that she's trapped and alone thanks to her own stupidity, and she ruthlessly suppresses the emotion, shunting as much junk data towards her co-processor as she can to overwhelm its circuits.

"Astrotrain!"

It's impossible to tell anything about what's ahead or behind her. Unspace reminds her of a densely-packed crystal forest, or a maze made out of mirrors, claustrophobic and disorienting. She sees glimmers of light and color reflecting from all directions as she flies, but instead of running into the wall of the maze it all just keeps moving around her, never closer or farther as far as she can tell.

Is she even moving at all? Her thrusters are burning, but there's no air for her sensors to detect flowing over her wings, not even the slightest changes in gravity and radiation she'd still be able to measure even in deepest space.

Skywarp starts to feel panicked, vocalizer crackling as she calls out Astrotrain's designation over and over. The only sound she can hear comes from inside her own chassis, the snarl of her engine and the creak of cabling stung too tightly, fans whirling with no atmosphere to pull through her vents.

"Astrotrain!" she shouts, nearly a shriek. This has to be the stupidest thing she's ever done and she's the Winglord of stupidity, why does she never listen to her trinemates, why does she never stop to _think_ before she leaps? The only comfort is that she can still feel the trine bond, even if the rest of what her spark is throwing at her is panicky pain. At least she isn't totally alone.

She hears a low rumble of noise and thinks it's a hallucination, or some component of her own frame breaking down under the stress, but then as if sliding out from around an overgrown crystal she spots Astrotrain in shuttle form, a distant speck but unmistakable in silhouette.

"Astrotrain!" she calls out, relief flooding her, thrusters kicking into maximum burn.

"Skywarp?" he shouts as they get closer.

She doesn't stop her momentum until she's slamming into his plating, grounding herself with the one solid thing in this horrible, unreal dimension.

"What are you doing here?" he asks, and she can hear the confused frown in his voice.

"Let me in," she says, because unspace is slightly less horrifying from the safety of his interior.

"That's not a good idea," Astrotrain says, "Lord Megatron regained consciousness."

"I don't care, open a door or I'll warp in," she says, honestly willing to risk the use of her ability, broken warp drive be damned, when the alternative is staying out here an astrocycle longer than she has to.

A hatch above his cockpit opens, and Skywarp climbs inside gratefully. There's a trace of air in his interior, presumably trapped when he teleported in, and its presence along with the artificial gravity soothes several sensors enough that she can dismiss their error reports from her HUD.

She sighs, shuttering her optics for an astrocycle before focusing again. Astrotrain's interior looks scorched, energon splashed on the plating and new dents in the walls. From behind the closed door separating his cab from his second compartment, she can hear a low roar of anger that undoubtedly belongs to Megatron.

"I thought you'd deactivate him," she says.

"Not yet," he replies. Metal thuds against metal, muffled and ominous. "Why did you come here? _How_ did you get here?"

"You left your dimensional ray behind, obviously," she says with a shrug. "But you've got to get out of here. If you stay in unspace too long you'll disintegrate."

Astrotrain's holo-avatar stares at her with a raised optical ridge. "Says who?"

"The Autobots, Ratchet and I dunno who else," she says. "Here, listen." She plays the recording over her external speakers, not sure if he recognizes Ratchet's vocal imprint but figuring the words are spoken with enough authority to be convincing anyway. "They got stuck in unspace themselves, I guess, that's how they found out."

He doesn't seem convinced.

"Look, just open a portal and hop to, okay? I don't care that you're doing... whatever with your Megatron," Skywarp says with a dismissive flick of her hand. He's not _her_ Megatron, she doesn't have to be loyal to him. "But you'll deactivate if you stay here."

"The multiverse drive isn't calibrated to your dimension anymore," he says.

She shrugs. "You don't have to drop me off right away, just can we _please_ get out of this creepy place before it swallows us up into nothingness? You did see what the unspace weapon the Quintessons had did, right? Too much unspace and bots just poofed."

That seems to get through to Astrotrain, and she slumps into one of his seats in relief at the sight of a glowing portal opening outside his window.

Her relief lasts only as long as it takes to pass from unspace to whatever is on the other side of the portal, at which point agony rips through her and she yells, blind to anything but the way her spark feels like it's being torn to pieces. It's a million times worse than the pain she's felt before, which had kind of radiated out through her warp drive.

The pain ebbs before she fries her vocalizer, from all-consuming to a level she can probably function with, though all she wants to do is stay curled up protectively around her chassis.

"Skywarp?" Astrotrain is saying urgently, and she comes to realize that she's cradled in his hands instead of sprawled out inside his alt mode. "Are you okay?"

She moans, hands pressing flat against her cockpit like she can protect her spark from whatever caused the pain. It feels like... She jerks upright, optics snapping open. It feels like her trine bond broke.

Her frame shudders, vents cracked as far open as they'll go, processor sluggishly calling up the emergency protocols for dealing with a broken trine bond.

Astrotrain is still trying to get her attention, but Skywarp can't spare any for him because this is the worst thing she has ever experienced, bar none. The pain is bad but the sense of loss, the abrupt realization that she's _alone_ -

She heaves, lurching to the side of Astrotrain's hands to purge her fuel tank. Then the coding activates, and suddenly everything is distant and muffled, like she's been wrapped in a bundle of insulation sheets, co-processor and spark included. She slumps down, struts as weak as rubber.

"What happened?" he asks, giant faceplate looming over her with an equally giant frown, hands held so she's secured against his chest.

She resets her vocalizer, swallows down the fuel and oil coating her intake. "Where are we?"

"Another Cybertron," he says, clearly still confused and concerned, and it would be funny- him, concerned about her?- except she can't really feel anything, right now.

"My trine doesn't exist here," Skywarp says, still rubbing over her chest reflexively. Breaking a trine bond doesn't necessarily deactivate you like a sparkmate bond would, but it hurts on every conceivable level, every atom of her being aching with awareness of the loss.

"Oh," he says, softly. "Will you... Survive?"

"Yeah," she croaks out. It only feels like she's going to extinguish. She shutters her optics for an astrocycle, two. "Can we go back to my dimension, now?" she asks, unsure if that will be enough to fix the gaping hole in her spark but at least it'll be the best place to start.

She can reform the bond, right? Or what if this means Starscream finally deactivated, or Thundercracker... If she was allowed to feel emotions through the thick walls of programming swaddling her, she'd probably be terrified at the prospect.

She almost misses Astrotrain's apologetic response. "It'll take some time. The multiverse drive doesn't save the frequencies once I switch."

"Whatever," she says. "You can put me down."

He complies, and she's a little bit surprised to find her legs holding her up after all. But that's the point of the program currently taking up most of her CPU, it keeps her stable in the event the bond breaks during battle so she doesn't lose _her_ spark as well.

It's night on this Cybertron, no lights to be seen save the distant glimmers of starlight, not even the glow of any moon to lighten up the shadows around them.

She looks around while Astrotrain does whatever he needs to do, obviously focusing on some internal system of his. Even as detached as she feels right now she can still see the benefit of trying to establish a perimeter, since they might be in hostile territory. And she thinks it would be better to be moving, anyway.

Around them is an open plain with a landscape she doesn't recognize, and barely a quarter klik away she nearly falls down a massive tear in the surface, an entire canyon yawning up out of the pitch black and stretching further than her optics can focus in the low light. They're on Cybertron, he said, but this doesn't look like any location she recognizes and such a large opening could be home to almost anything.

She flicks her optical sensors to thermal, but the only thing giving off any heat nearby is her own frame. Ultraviolet doesn't reveal anything, nor any of her other filters, even a sonic ping for her echolocation subsystem disappearing without a return echo. The canyon is big and the wall nearest her is rough, she can tell that much from the minute changes in airflow over her wing sensors, but she can't discern more than that.

It's unsettling, but unless she feels like flying into it to find out more, she has to keep moving to see what other threats might be lurking. She paces a circle around Astrotrain, trying and failing to match the area with anything in her databanks- is that the outline of the Manganese Mountains to the west? But that would put them _in_ the Argon Sea, so that doesn't make sense- and stops abruptly when she spots fresh energon glowing in droplets on the ground. It looks like someone with an injury, but it's just the two of them, and this energon isn't quite the right color, maybe the line was contaminated with oil or hydraulic fluid...

The two of them and Megatron, Skywarp realizes. In her distress over losing her trine she'd forgotten him, which is usually a fatal mistake no matter the dimension.

She's never seen regular energon after being tainted by Dark Energon, but if she had to guess, that would account for the strange shade. Frag. She jogs over to Astrotrain and demands, "Is Megatron still secured?"

By the way he goes stiff, she knows the answer. "You let him _go_?"

"He must have slipped out when I transformed," Astrotrain says.

She spits out a few choice curses in Vosian and would you look at that, she's still allowed to feel anger despite the protocols wrapped like insulation around her system. Skywarp kicks a thruster against the ground like a sparkling throwing a tantrum and kind of wishes she could throw a real tantrum.

She can transform and try to track Megatron down, but she already knows that without her warp drive operational, she doesn't have a single prayer's chance of actually taking him on. She's a good warrior, but he's _Megatron_ \- even with a primed and ready warp drive, the odds would be very much against her.

"What do you know about this dimension?" she asks, trying to keep calm because apparently she's allowed to feel all _sorts_ of things now as the broken-trine protocols are superseded by a new emergency. This Other Megatron is hopped up on Dark Energon, and from the reports she got he still has the Matrix in his possession as well, but maybe it doesn't have to be her problem.

Astrotrain shrugs. "Not much. The multiverse drive has an alert for Quintessons, but everything else is a guess."

She stares off in the direction the energon drops indicate Megatron fled. This Cybertron seems... dormant. Maybe even totally offline. Even more so than her own before the Allspark was returned. There's no sounds other than her and Astrotrain, no glimmers of lights on the horizon, even the air seems stale despite being in a wide-open plain.

Is it too much to ask for that this Other Megatron is stranded on a barren planet where he can't do any harm, regardless of the Dark Energon in his system?

"You can come back to finish him later," Skywarp decides. "Get me out of here, first." Without that program throttling down the effects of the broken trine bond the pain comes creeping back, and it's terrible. Her spark throbs, seeking a bond that doesn't exist.

⁂ _Thundercracker Starscream_ **_trine_ ** _where are you it's me I'm here where are you_ ⁂

She grimaces, hand flat against her chest and digits spasming, unconsciously trying to dig their way in to soothe the burn. It's only temporary, she tells herself, it's only going to last until she goes through the next portal and can reconnect with her original dimension.

"I don't think so," a voice says from behind her, and Skywarp starts to turn, weapons onlining in a crackling rush. Before she can even complete the movement she's seized, a large hand wrapping around her neck and pulling her up off the ground.

She claws at the hand holding her, thrusters kicking out, but the grip doesn't waver.

"I must say I'm surprised, Skywarp," the Other Megatron says, voice a low purr next to her audial. "It was always your trine leader who was the traitor in my universe."

"Lord Megatron," Astrotrain says, and she's kind of panicking too hard to really focus on him, but she doesn't _think_ he was setting her up to be deactivated, so that's. Something.

"You will transport me to our rightful universe, or do I have to rip that teleportation device from your sparkless corpse?" Megatron says, his voice a low dangerous rumble.

"Will you let her go?" Astrotrain asks, one hand partly extended, like he wants to reach for her.

"What use do I have for a defective seeker?" Megatron says, and she feels his digits tighten further around her neck, the pressure enough to start restricting energon flow to her processor.

Skywarp twists herself as much as she's able to get her wings out of the way, and manages to fire off a volley of shots from her null-rays directly at his chassis behind her. This close they should have _some_ effect, even with how heavy his armor is, but Megatron doesn't even flinch.

"Pathetic," he spits, and she has a split astrocycle to register the feeling of a weapon's muzzle against her plating before it fires, aimed right at the center of her chest.

Her warp drive is fried but her outlier ability was always tied to her spark itself, an innate gift from Primus, and in the desperate nanocycle before termination she _leaps_ -

The weird thing is it doesn't really hurt all that much. Skywarp can tell that there's a hole straight through her chassis letting the light of her spark spill out into the still, dark air, is aware that energon and various other internal fluids are leaking out of her and onto the ground where she was discarded, but it's like her processor has switched off her sensornet and is just feeding her random information instead. Or maybe the blast cauterized all her sensory wires, she's heard that can happen with Megatron's fusion canon.

But everything else is distant too, like how she's aware of loud noises and flashes of light somewhere off to her left, but she can't parse what they belong to.

It's kind of peaceful, in a way. Just the sight of unfamiliar stars up above, shining beautiful and distant.

Until her battered and practically container-less spark flickers with a purple spike of transwarp energy and she can feel _that_ , agony like nothing she's ever imagined before, pain that makes the very word 'pain' seem like it belongs to a light caress. She's been a Decepticon warrior for millions of stellar cycles, she's had limbs ripped away and circuitry melted and taken damage she was sure would deactivate her, but nothing compares to the pain she's in right now.

Her optics are streaming fluid, HUD just flashing ominous shades of red rather than actually showing any distinct errors, servos all along her frame twitching spastically. It's so dark on this planet that when her vision clears a bit she doesn't see Astrotrain until he's practically on top of her, energon covering half his helm in a weird sickly glow.

He might say something, but her language centers are scrambled, processor shutting down everything non-essential. She falls offline when he grabs her, floats back and finds herself inside his alt-mode, sprawled out on the floor and wishing his plating was warmer against hers. It's usually so warm.

At least she can feel her trine again, Skywarp thinks dizzily, using what little coordination she can muster to send them love and apologies through the restored bond.

Her spark flickers again, maybe another attempt at warping away from her failing chassis or maybe just on its way to extinguishing, and she's slammed into oblivion.

Skywarp honestly doesn't expect to come online again. She blinks her optics and stares at a bright white ceiling, trying to figure out if she's really functional or if she's at the Well of Allsparks about to chat with Primus, or whatever it is you do when you're deactivated.

She still has optics, though, and that implies she has the rest of her frame as well, so she sends a quick ping through her system to find out. Huh, all limbs accounted for, and no giant gaping hole in her chest either. Her cycle is definitely looking up.

A pair of blue optics move into her range of vision, which strikes Skywarp as weird.

"Hm, you're awake again," a mech's voice says, and her processor spins a little in place before tagging it and the slowly-sharpening image of the mech it belongs to with the designation Ratchet.

Wait. Ratchet? The _Autobot_ medic? Maybe she scrambled her databanks, it would explain why everything seems weird and fuzzy and a bit like she's floating.

She reboots her optics, somehow more surprised when she sees the same thing as before. "What?" she says, but her vocalizer needs to be reset because it just comes out as kind of a clicking noise.

Ratchet runs some kind of scanner over her and she shies away instinctively, or tries to- her limbs are strapped down with restraints, a current of energy running through them to prevent her from moving so much as a nanometer in any direction. Definitely not the Well, then. Maybe the Pit?

"Good, your spark's finally stabilizing," Ratchet says, and then flicks a reproachful look at her. "For a given value of 'stable', anyway."

Skywarp manages an awkward crackle of static in response, which might be worse than the clicking. Belatedly she remembers that Autobots getting their hands on her spark and her warp drive is Very Bad- like, 'Starscream will strip every wire in her frame as punishment' levels of bad. But with these restraints on her, she can't do a single thing.

"How's your processor?" he asks, putting the scanner away and assaulting her with a tiny yet painfully bright light aimed directly at her optics instead.

Maybe she's in another alternate dimension? One where the Autobots are willing to have their best medic repair her, for some reason.

She attempts to ask what the _slag_ is going on, but her vocalizer only renders a vague groaning noise.

"Ah-huh," Ratchet says, like she was answering his question. He puts away the light and leaves her field of view, muttering something too quietly for her to hear.

Skywarp strains to follow his presence, on edge and confused and not entirely sure this isn't a strange hallucination, but when she turns her helm her optical feed goes kinda wooshy and staticy, and then fades to black completely as she falls into stasis again.

The second time she wakes up after the whole Other Megatron thing, it's a bit less of a surprise. The fact that she's still staring at a pristine white Autobot medbay is surprising, yeah, but not the fact that she's online in the first place.

Skywarp gives a cautious twitch and discovers that she's still restrained, but the current's been turned off so it's just the strength of the cables holding her down. There's not enough give for her to move much, not enough to work up the leverage to get free probably, but she can crane her helm up and do a scan of her environment at least.

Her optics skate over her own chassis as she sweeps the seemingly empty room, then rapidly snap back. The glass canopy of her cockpit is gone, which she supposes makes sense considering the place she got shot and the fact that the Autobots are unlikely to have replacement seeker parts on hand, but what really catches her attention is the jarring purple lump in the middle of her chest.

It's humming slightly, a blinking light on one of its sides, obviously a device of some sort and not a weird Autobot fashion statement.

Skywarp sends a cautious ping through her system. Most reports come back reading acceptable parameters, but a big flashing alert on her HUD causes her to shutter her optics and wonder why she couldn't have just gotten deactivated instead. 'WARP DRIVE NOT FOUND'

It's not like she was getting much use out of it before, she tries to tell herself, this doesn't really change her situation. Except now the Autobots have their greasy digits on whatever parts of it weren't destroyed in the blast, and that is emblazoned in her processor in big glyphs as a very bad outcome.

"Now that you're online, perhaps you care to explain the Quintesson energy signature I detected in your spark's powerflow readings." Wow, she should have finished sweeping the room first because she somehow missed an entire Autobot standing at a console over to the side.

Skywarp cranes her neck to confirm the identity of the voice. Perceptor, optics still not repaired. Seriously, do the Autobots have _any_ spare parts to go around?

"What?" she says once his actual words register in her processor. Why is Perceptor here at all, and what the _frag_ does he mean by Quintesson anything? But hey, her vocalizer produces actual language this time, which is something.

He walks closer, and normally a scientist like him would be no threat to a heavily armed-and-armored mecha like Skywarp, but she's kind of tied to a med slab with her weapons conspicuously detached, so she shies backwards a little in self-preservation. Not to mention he's talking about her spark, and her warp drive is already gone- she remembers all too well onlining in Shockwave's lab in various stages of experimentation, before Megatron finally decided the lack of results weren't worth the continued risk of not having a teleporter at all. Scientists might be useless on the battlefield, usually, but she's not _on_ the battlefield.

"Ratchet requested I run various scans while he attempted to stabilize your spark," Perceptor says in that flat, bland voice of his. "One of them revealed on-going contact with Quintesson technology, specifically a drain of energy associated with entering the Loop." He cocks his head to the side ever so slightly, as if getting a different angle for his useless optics to see her. "Have you had further contact with an access point for their simulation?"

"Of course not!" she says immediately, sensornet crawling with the thought of willingly sticking her head into one of those helmets again. And yes, okay, some horrible part of her circuitry that she can't erase still remembers it fondly, wants the simplicity and peace of standing around watching some dumb parade, but she'd never _actually_ go back in!

She thought they locked up all the tech anyway, for the eggheads to study. ...Except for the stuff that's hooked to Starscream that no one knows about, of course. And, _oh_. If Screamer's stuck in the sim, and she's trined to him, that might explain why it's showing up like her spark is the one being affected.

"Hm," he says. "Perhaps contact with their multiverse drive is mimicking the same effect."

Which makes her think about Astrotrain, and what's happened with him. He must have managed to get away from the Other Megatron somehow, and brought her to a medic fast enough that she didn't extinguish along the way. She has no clue why he picked the Autobots, though, or whether he made it through okay himself. He was also damaged, wasn't he?

And for that matter, why _did_ they repair her, anyway? If they just wanted her warp drive, well, they already took that- and they could have just put her spark in storage to study instead of patching up her frame around it. Maybe they don't realize it's her spark that drives her teleportation, and not the warp drive?

"What's going on?" Skywarp asks, cranial unit already starting to ache with all the confusion and uncertainty. "Why'd you repair me, where's Astrotrain? And _what_ is this thing on my chest?"

"That 'thing' is a subatomic stabilizer," he says, "It's keeping the transwarp radiation your spark produces from fluctuating while Wheeljack fabricates a more permanent solution."

She cycles air through her vents and drops her optics to the purple device. Then her gaze snaps back to Perceptor, because bad enough they saw her warp drive but he's not supposed to know about the subspace thing. No Autobot is. "Uh," she says, processor groping for a lie. "My spark's actually just purple cause of a filter?"

"The radiation changes the visible spectrum output? Interesting," he says, and she curses herself because _duh_ , he's blind! He couldn't have seen the color.

"What did you do to Astrotrain?" Skywarp says to change the subject. Her comm is disabled, of course, so- wait. Her comm isn't disabled. She sends another diagnostic ping to be sure, because disabling comms is like, the _first_ thing you do to a prisoner. But her attempt at sending a message fails anyway. Maybe there's a remote scrambler instead, or the room itself is shielded?

"I believe he's somewhere nearby this facility," Perceptor says with an obvious lack of interest. "He elected to stay until your repairs were completed. Now that you're awake, I'm going to perform some further scans."

She stares at him, because what? Astrotrain isn't a prisoner? Was... was he some sort of double-agent this whole time? It would explain why she's in the Autobots' repair bay and not their brig, but she has a hard time believing he isn't a Decepticon through and through, despite how terrible his dimension's Megatron turned out to be.

She opens her intake to ask for a better explanation of what the _slagging frag_ is going on, and to deny Perceptor whatever scans he's talking about, but is interrupted by the sound of a door sliding open and a boisterous Wheeljack calling out, "Think I got it this time, Percy!"

Skywarp rolls her helm away from Perceptor to glare at Wheeljack, because unlike most scientists that stay behind the front lines, she knows Wheeljack can and will fight. There's something shiny and metallic in his hands, roughly a globe made of interlocking segments. Presumably it explodes, whether he intended it to be a bomb or not.

"Hey, you're awake!" Wheeljack says to her, the finials on his helm lighting up with excitement. "Maybe now you can tell us why ole' Shocky used so much nobidium nitride in your warp drive's main power conversion coil? I mean, that stuff is barely even a superconductor at all, and it's gotta be distorting something _fierce_ with all the field fluctuations you do."

She opens her mouth, and closes it. Resets her vocalizer because the shape in his hands makes sense now- it's the main body of her warp drive, or a version of it, anyway. "What?"

"Oh, did he not give you the specs?" Wheeljack says, and shakes his helm. "Figures."

"This arrangement seems stable," Perceptor says, a light she was too preoccupied to notice coming from his scope flicking out. "You were able to work in the euxenite?"

"Yup," Wheeljack says, grin back in place as he turns his attention from her to Perceptor. "Had my doubts despite what you said about Mac but phew, the results when I got it tempered in!"

"You recreated my warp drive," Skywarp says, surprised when her voice sounds pretty steady, because this right here is a horrible, terrible outcome.

"Pfft, more like _improved_ it," Wheeljack says with flippant pride. "Some of the sensor relays made no sense, even figuring in Shockwave's love of redundancy. Plus, this one is made from an all-new alloy! Can't believe Maccadam was just sitting on that stash for so long, the old rascal."

She really, really wants someone to tell her what the slag is going on. Are the Autobots going to reprogram her? Hold the warp drive over her helm as leverage until she willingly defects, or performs some act of sabotage? Are they just taunting her? "What do you want with me?" she asks out loud, the steadiness of her vocalizer cracking into something that sounds weak and scared.

Wheeljack glances at Perceptor, who presumably takes no notice on account of the blown optics, yet is the one to speak.

"In exchange for obtaining the Quintesson multiverse drive we agreed to repair you," Perceptor says. "Thus, the replacement of your damaged warp drive."

Skywarp stares at him. Blinks her optics, reboots her audials. "But," she says, knowing it's dumb even as the words leave her vocalizer, "that's Astrotrain's." He gave up the multiverse drive? Just to get her repaired? That doesn't make any sense at all.

"It _was_ his," Wheeljack agrees. "He refused to carry a squad back through the multiverse himself to find Megatron X, but he did agree to let us have the drive itself instead. Everyone wins! Except Megatron X, but not everyone can win."

Her processor is spinning in confusion. "So you're just gonna replace my warp drive and let me go?" she asks, totally skeptical.

"Essentially," Perceptor says.

"...Right," she says sarcastically. Skywarp is pretty sure _nothing_ is that good of a deal, and assumes the replacement warp drive will blow her up or have a tracker or skew her destinations, or something. Or just not work. Even if it functions perfectly, that just means they have detailed knowledge of her ability. Forget Starscream's punishment, Megatron is going to _smelt_ her for that.

"How come I'm tied down and disarmed, then? If I'm just a patient," she says.

Wheeljack snickers. "Because you kept trying to fight Ratchet when you were high on sensor-blockers," he says.

...Alright, that _does_ sound like something she would do. Even right now, she's itching to get free, can't help tugging slightly against the cables holding her down.

"Speaking of the good doctor, let's get him up here and pop this in!" Wheeljack says, hefting the warp drive he's apparently designed up into the air.

Skywarp realizes with a horrible sinking feeling that she's going to have to let them put her spark into a stasis field if they're really going to do this procedure, that she's probably _already_ been in that state for Primus knows how long. She might have some idea what to expect when it's a Decepticon medic meddling with her like that, but who knows what these Autobots will do?

At least she knows Thundercracker hasn't let Starscream extinguish in her absence, because she can feel the trine bond still humming in her spark.

"I have scans to run first," Perceptor says, and Wheeljack ex-vents a sigh but doesn't argue, setting the warp drive down and leaving the room.

"I'm not letting you scan me," she says with all the defiance she can muster, like she's in any position to argue instead of being tied down to a med slab.

"Without these scans, we cannot integrate the warp drive into your system," he says.

Skywarp stares at him distrustfully, but can't tell if he's lying or not. A Decepticon would just scan her anyway, but he seems content to stare her down with his creepy empty optics until she caves. And she does cave, because it's not like they haven't already run a million scans on her while she was offline. Really, what's a few more.

"Fine," she mutters resentfully.

Perceptor sweeps a beam of light over her from the scope on his shoulder, focusing his attention on the center of her chest. She wonders, with a sudden anxiety, what's holding her spark in place right now. A regular spark case? Some weird hybrid contraption? Maybe there's nothing at all, they just welded a patch down over the hole and she's only technically inhabiting her frame.

Skywarp pulls at the restraints, needing to pry open the patch and see, but of course the cables hold firm. The more she struggles the more trapped she feels, anxiety rising in her co-processor as ancient seeker coding realizes she can't get to the air.

"You shouldn't be experiencing discomfort from these scans," Perceptor says.

"Can you at least untie me?" she snaps.

He hesitates slightly. "You'll need to stay still for the scan to be successful."

"Yeah, of course," Skywarp says, itching all over with the need to figure out what the Autobots have done to her, the need to just _move_ after Primus knows how long strapped to this slab. Her wings ache dully from the pressure of being trapped between chassis and med slab this whole time, a sure sign she's been lying on them too long.

The light from his scope blinks out, and it's a struggle but she stays perfectly still as he undoes the cables around each of her limbs.

As soon as the last restraint is undone, she leaps off the slab- wobbling, unused to the strange hollow lightness in her chest and her struts all creaky from disuse- and lunges for the door while Perceptor calls a command for her to stop. Apparently they're too dumb to even put a basic lock on the door because it opens automatically upon her approach, and she doesn't hesitate as she picks a random direction to run.

Does she have any idea where she's going, or really why she's running in the first place considering the cyber-cat is already well out of the bag regarding her warp drive? No, not really. She just knows that she needs to get away from all these fragging Autobots.

Unfortunately for Skywarp, the place is crawling with Autobots on account of it being their turf, and she's still weak and loopy from surgery. On pure instinct she attempts to teleport in the astrocycle before she collides with some random Autobot who's appeared in the hallway, but nothing happens.

And weirdly, it's kind of a relief that nothing happens, because the pain she's been experiencing lately when trying to warp isn't 'nothing'. But this time she just... stays in place, and gets mowed down by a huge grounder as a result.

"Oh, whoops!" the grounder says, "Didn't see you there." And then, while she tries and fails to get up because the impact jarred her equilibrium circuits, "Err. What's a Decepticon doing in the hospital?"

Skywarp is saved from having to answer by Perceptor's arrival, his travel speed much faster than she would have assumed. Or maybe she's just that slow right now.

"It's alright," he says, presumably to the Autobot. The other Autobot, because right now _all_ of them are Autobots here, aside from her. And Astrotrain, wherever they've stashed him. "She's authorized to be here."

She grimaces and swats at the hands reaching to haul her up to her thrusters, but the grounder she ran into just grabs her upper arm- bare without her null rays because they're not actually stupid enough to leave her weapons attached- and yanks her up anyway.

"You need some help, er, escorting her somewhere?" the Autobot asks over her helm.

"Yes. This way," Perceptor says.

"Hey!" Skywarp protests, and is ignored. So much for 'not being a prisoner'. She seethes as she's frogmarched back to the room she was being kept in, but doesn't fight very hard against the Autobot's grip. If she _really_ wanted to she could get free, of course, but smashing into him like that made her remember how much she hates being unable to teleport, and if they really did fabricate a new, working drive for her...

"Do I have to put the restraints back on?" Perceptor asks her as the grounder pushes her towards the med slab. She can already see that he's fiddling with the door controls, presumably taking it off auto-open.

"No," she says petulantly as she sits on the med slab, regardless of whether it might be necessary or not. She's smarting from being caught so easily, but the itch to be out of here hasn't really abated.

He regards her for an astrocycle, then turns to the groundpounder. "Thank you, Hosehead. You may return to what you were doing."

"If you're sure?" the Autobot says, looking between the two of them with a kind of nervous expression. "I can stay and watch the door, if you want."

"That won't be necessary," Perceptor says.

Skywarp makes a mocking face at the grounder's back as they leave the room, secure in the knowledge that no one but her can even see it.

"Remain still so I can finish these scans," he says to her, scope one more lighting up.

She fidgets but stays mostly in place on the slab, anxiety building up once more at the thought of what the Autobots are doing with her.

"Were you aware that the 'energon flavoring' you favored at Maccadam's was composed of the same elements as the majority of your warp drive?" he asks conversationally, scanner a tight yellow-tinged beam aimed directly at her spark.

"Huh?" she says, thrown for a loop by the random bit of information.

"I thought it was curious," Perceptor says. "Wheeljack did his own analysis and concluded the elements, in the proportions already present in the mix, would be ideal for recreating key components. And yet, Maccadam was not known for his scientific endeavors."

"Uh, I guess not," she says, because he seems to want a response from her. It's a really weird thing to even think about, but she supposes it explains why the mix tastes so good- isn't your self-repair system supposed to make you crave the metals your frame is running low on, or something like that? Then again, maybe she just likes the taste and it's not any deeper than that. Still weird that he put her designation on the container, though.

The scan changes to a purple color, the beam broader and kind of fuzzy. What is he even looking at, anyway? Her processor keeps queuing up protocols for escaping from enemy hands, and it's getting really had to dismiss the suggestions.

"Hmm, that's interesting," Perceptor says, presumably to himself.

The door opens and Skywarp doesn't think, she just bolts for it. Unfortunately Ratchet seems prepared for her because he catches her around her middle before she's even cleared the doorway, cursing her and all seekers while she struggles against his grip.

"Let me go!" she yells, but Ratchet just grabs the base of one twitching wing and with a single press in just the right spot, somehow sets her system screaming with alerts about imminent damage. It's enough to make her hesitate, and with her off-balance from that he forces her backwards away from the door enough for it to close behind them.

"Get back on that slab before I _give_ you something to run from," Ratchet threatens as he wrestles with her. He's not much of a fighter, no match even for a grounded seeker under ordinary circumstances, but he still has her wing and then Perceptor calmly comes up and grabs her arms from behind. In response Skywarp abruptly forces herself to go limp, several cybertonnes of slack weight dragging them down.

"You absolute _brat_ ," Ratchet grouses, glaring at her. He let go of her wing as she fell, at least. "Is this the thanks I deserve for keeping your wretched spark online?"

"Not like I _asked_ you to, Autobutt," she says from the floor.

He rolls his optics so forcefully she's halfway waiting for them to pop out of his faceplate. "No, that was your giant lunk of a lover," he says.

Skywarp opens her intake to say that Astrotrain isn't her _lover_ , but snaps her mouth shut because. He kinda might be? She has no idea if there's a specific definition to that sort of thing. It's a pretty weird thought, though, but then again this whole situation is pretty weird. She'd never give up one of _her_ components to get a fragbuddy repaired.

"I still have a scan to complete," Perceptor says into the awkward silence, "Would you prefer the floor, or the med slab?"

She tips her helm back to glare at him, not even caring that he can't see.

"Come on, up," Ratchet says, and grabs a wrist to drag her upright. She considers staying right where she is- if she can't escape, she might as well be a royal pain in their afts- but, well, it's not very comfortable down on the floor. And if they really _are_ here to restore her warp drive...

"Soon as my warp drive's back in I'm gonna steal that scope and toss it in a pit," she mutters, not really sure if she wants them to hear or not.

Considering Ratchet's glare, she's pretty sure he heard.

It's less disorienting coming around from the surgery this time, and Skywarp barely spares an astrocycle to ping her internal diagnostic to see that everything is back where it should be before activating her newly-replaced warp drive.

And it _works_ , smooth and perfect, she doesn't even care that she's just dumped herself midair a mechanometer away from the med slab and falls to the ground before she can right herself.

"Don't _do_ that!" Ratchet yells, but she laughs all wobbly with static, because what's he gonna do to stop her? "We have to run diagnostics-"

She can't hear him because she's already teleported out into the hallway, laughing at how easy it is, how _right_. There's no lag at all, no strain, just instantaneous travel to her destination.

An Autobot in the hallway startles at her appearance, and she waves as she leaps, planning to get up in the air and fly-

Unfortunately for her plans she slams into some kind of barrier mid-warp, like ramming into a wall but without pain, just a sudden stop that dumps her back to the floor, albeit on the top story of the building rather than where she started. Skywarp groans in annoyance. She had hoped they were just stupid for not putting her in the specially-shielded cell they usually use when she's been taken captive (not that it happens very often, thanks)- but apparently they actually just shielded the whole building, instead.

"Ow," she says, more for effect than because it actually hurts.

"Woah!" a voice she instantly identifies as Bumblebee, perpetual annoyance and harbinger of worse Autobots to come, says. "What was- oh, Skywarp. Huh."

Skywarp collects herself from the floor with as much dignity as she can manage, hoping she can glare the little bug into submission. Unfortunately as it turns out Windblade is right next to him, hand delicately covering her intake like that'll hide the snicker she's making, so her glare doesn't go very far at all.

"Nice of you to drop in," Windblade says.

" _Nice of you to drop in_ ," Skywarp mutters in a mocking tone, flicking her wings irritably.

"I guess Ratchet finished fixing you up, then?" Bumblebee says cheerfully, either having not heard or ignoring her sarcastic comment. He's smiling at her like they're friends.

"Yep," she says with a sharp grin, "All ready to go back out and deactivate some more helpless Autobots. Wonder who I'll start with?"

Bumblebee's own smile falters.

"You might not get the chance," Windblade says, putting a hand on his shoulder, still smirking ever so slightly herself. "Optimus and Megatron are having another peace conference soon. The war might really be over."

Skywarp doesn't want to think about why that's an absolutely terrifying thought. But hey, at least it means Megatron was repaired successfully after all? Screamer will be pleased, when he finally onlines again- he'd _hate_ to find out someone else deactivated Megatron in his absence, even if it took a more powerful version of Megatron himself to do the deed.

"Whatever," she says dismissively. She didn't come here to chat with these two, she was on her way out. Teleporting directly apparently isn't an option with the shielding in place, but the room she's been dumped into has a window. Skywarp doesn't have any of her weapons but she doesn't need them to break a stupid window; she just jumps, igniting her thrusters and covering her helm as she goes, and smashes her entire frame through amid the Autobots' squawking protests.

It hurts- apparently they used transparent aluminum instead of glass, so she might as well have blasted through the wall instead- but she's out with little enough damage that she doesn't bother even to slow down.

As soon as she's a few mechanometers away from the building her comm flares to life with missed message notifications, and aha! She _knew_ they'd been blocking it.

Most of them are from Thundercracker, and her spark itself throbs with guilt. Had he felt what she did, when the trine bond seemed broken in that other dimension she visited? How much of her injury did he experience second-hand?

Down in the Autobot hospital someone is shouting at her from the broken window, but Skywarp ignores them as she flips into her jet mode and zips away through the air.

She takes it easy, teleporting herself only a quarter of the way to the Decepticon base, then a further half, but each jump is smooth and easy without any hint the Autobots have built in some kind of throttling mechanism or whatever. She whoops in victory and jumps the rest of the way, straight into her berthroom.

Thundercracker isn't there, but that's alright. She has to go see Soundwave and Hook for the standard post-prisoner sanitization procedure anyway, make sure she isn't loaded up with listening bugs or viruses or something, and so it's kind of a good thing he isn't here because then she'd have to drag him along as well after contaminating him.

She goes to visit Starscream as soon as she gets a bit of free time, warping straight in and grinning to herself when there's nothing but a flicker of satisfaction from her spark, not even the furthest hint of difficulty or pain. This new warp drive might actually give her _more_ range, but she hasn't really tested that yet.

"Hey Screamer," Skywarp says, the happiness dimming somewhat. He's still lying there on his slab, drip-fed energon and mutilated, devoid of most signs of existence except for the spark still glowing in his chest.

Her hand reflexively goes up to her cockpit, feeling the newness of her own repairs. She had to have a proper canopy put in by Knock Out, an ugly green that clashes with her paint but at least is better than the flat pane of glass the Autobots fit her with. Other than that, though, the Autobots had done a shockingly good job with her repairs. According to Thundercracker, they even smoothed out the welds on the repaired section between her wings so it's nearly seamless.

Her self-diagnostic had reported a literal hole through her chassis, components melted to slag from the point-blank blast. Repairing that kind of damage isn't easy- it's honestly kind of a surprise they even bothered, instead of just transferring her to a new frame instead.

Maybe that's what she should look into for Starscream. His frame's damage is stabilized, she had enough skill to stop up the major leaks so his self-repair could get the small ones, but she can't even begin to replace his ripped-off plating or attach new parts with her limited understanding of anatomy. She'd consider transferring him, except that his processor is buried under that Quintesson helmet (maybe- she still can't tell if there's anything actually under there) and without his hard-coded memories, all his extensive databanks, he'll flip out.

"Sorry, no present this time," she says. "My presence will have to be present enough." Skywarp grins at him, but he doesn't react of course.

Thundercracker checked up on him when she was absent, thinking that the bond might have broken because Starscream extinguished. He's still angry, she knows, but he seems to be coming around- seeing Screamer so unnaturally still and quiet had sapped some of his anger, and thinking about this as a punishment for his crimes took away even more.

"Megatron recovered, so you've got to get better and deactivate him yourself," she tells him.

She sighs, ex-venting into the stale air of the little room.

Perceptor had apparently been able to see Quintesson activity in her system long after she left the parade-sim herself, and she can only imagine it's because of Starscream. Now that she knows the Autobots can be bought for the right price (so much for all their high-and-mighty morals!) she wonders if she can find some payment to get the scientist to fix Screamer. But the only thing she has to barter with is a dwindling supply of shanix and her warp drive, which they now have the specs for anyway.

She ponders this for a while, fussing over minor details in the room, cleaning up a spot of potential rust on Starscream's frame. Even with him like this, there's something comforting in just being close to his spark.

The sound of an engine reverberating deep in the mine shafts outside cuts into her thoughts, but Skywarp doesn't startle. Only one mecha knows about this place besides her, and she would recognize the cadence of that engine anywhere, the low thrum in her spark as her trine gathers together.

"Thought you might be here," Thundercracker says when he's wedged his way through the door, dusty from taking the long way down instead of hitching a ride when she teleported. She must have been here longer than she thought, for him to have had time to fly in.

She nods, and waits for him to greet Starscream before saying anything. "I think the Autobots can help him."

He looks up at her sharply, wings fanning out low and wide, not aggressive but not giving her a nanometer either. "The Autobots," he says.

"They fixed me up," Skywarp says, digits tapping against the replacement cockpit. Hopefully she can find a nicer match soon and not have to wait for her nanites to slowly alter the color on their own. "And that scientist I told you about, he said he could tell Screamer was still under a sim."

"You _told them_?" Thundercracker yelps.

"No, no!" She shakes her head, holds up her hands. "Just, he said he could see Quintesson energy or something when he tested my spark, and the only way that makes sense is if he was picking up on Starscream through the bond."

"No one knows he's still online, do they?" he says, thoughtfully. It's commonly understood that the Autobots, having no seekers in their army and it being a very long time since Vos reigned the skies, don't know the first thing about trinebonds aside from making note of which trios stick together. Not that even their _own_ faction is much better; it still stings that with Starscream presumed deactivated her file lists her as trineless now, no one bothering to even confirm it.

"Just us," Skywarp says, and then meekly adds, "I may have said something to Astrotrain."

Thundercracker gives her a Look, one that makes her want to shrink back even though she holds her airspace.

"It's fine, he hasn't told anyone!" she's quick to assure him, even though she doesn't actually know whether he's held his glossa or not. "But anyway, that scientist- Perceptor, useless microscope alt or something- he was the one who got us out of the first sim. I mean, he had help, but..." She trails off, repressing a shiver as she remembers breaking free, the chaos and the fear of suddenly being surrounded by sinister alien tech and deactivated frames, realizing that the dumb parade was just a cover for an alien invasion to murder them all. "If anyone can get Starscream out, I think it's him."

"I can't believe _you're_ talking about working with the Autobots," he says, shaking his helm a little.

"I was thinking we kidnap the scientist, and he's fragging Dead End, so we put a blaster to him for leverage?" she suggests.

"We should tell Megatron," Thundercracker says.

"About Dead End and his Autobot?" she asks, confused by how that fits in to the plan.

"No, I think we should tell Megatron about Starscream," he says. "He's already more like his old self, you've seen it yourself. If anyone has the ability to get someone- even an Autobot- to fix Starscream, it'll be Megatron."

"So that Megatron can deactivate him himself!?" Skywarp shouts, voice rising almost to a screech in disbelief.

"Do you really think Megatron would do that?" he says calmly. He reaches out and puts a hand on her arm, right below the attachment point for her (replacement, still needing to be painted to match) null rays. "Come on, we both know that Screamer can do _anything_ and Megatron will eventually forgive him."

"He really messed up this time, though," she says, and glances back at Starscream lying on his slab. No one's sure of the exact details because they hadn't exactly stopped to chat with the Quintessons while exterminating them, but he must have done something to earn being used to create the Judge. And it was definitely him in there condemning them all to deactivation, even if it turned out to be a remote-piloting situation than a direct reformat.

"And Megatron's going to want to punish him," Thundercracker says. "But he won't deactivate him, we both know it. Starscream can- Starscream _has_!- literally shot Megatron in the faceplate and not even been removed as Second in Command."

She fidgets, knowing there's a lot of evidence to support what Thundercracker is saying but also knowing that Megatron surely _does_ have a limit, and they might be getting close to finding it. Just like she was sure Thundercracker had found his own limit after planet Dirt. Plus, if they tell Megatron, that puts the two of them on his radar- and he might not deactivate Starscream, but she's nowhere near as confident the same can be said for them.

"Do we have to?" she asks, unwilling to accept the risk just yet.

"There's another meeting with the Autobots scheduled three cycles away," he says, as if she's forgotten. "We should tell him before then."

Skywarp cycles stagnant air through her vents and considers just popping over and abducting Perceptor, or maybe asking Astrotrain if his experience with Quintesson tech is of any use. But she looks at Starscream, a thin layer of dust on his chassis in the places she hasn't cleaned off yet, and knows that she's grasping at wires. Maybe she could threaten Perceptor into compliance, but can she withstand the backlash from Autobots and Decepticons alike when Starscream is repaired and she's to thank for it?

"And besides, you can always warp Starscream away if it looks like Megatron is really going to try something," Thundercracker says, a poor attempt at a smile on his faceplate.

Alright, so. She can see how it might look kind of bad, but Skywarp feels like she shouldn't really be blamed for assuming that Astrotrain would make his own way back to base and they could just kind of, return to being casual fragbuddies. Make the occasional 'face comm. Pick up where they left off as if he hadn't literally saved her spark and presumably stood up to his Megatron enough to grab her before running.

If nothing else, she was clearly still a mess from the sensor-blockers in her system when she bolted from the Autobots so she can't have been expected to think clearly, and then she was dealing with Thundercracker's panic over thinking she'd been deactivated and being unable to contact her, not to mention the whole security-slash-possible-treason fiasco what with her disappearing right as Megatron was rendered vulnerable only to reappear on the Autobot side of the planet, so she was a _bit_ preoccupied.

And it's not like she even asked Astrotrain to do all that, anyway! He could have just dumped her at the repair bay, or just left her in the hangar like any other Decepticon would have, it was his own decision to seek out a medic- an _enemy_ medic!- directly and then barter for her repairs.

Thundercracker just stares at her like she's a colossal idiot when she explains this to him, which takes a little lift out from under her wings.

"You're an idiot," he says.

"No I'm not," Skywarp replies, even though he tends to only call her dumb when she really _has_ been dumb, unlike Screamer who considers everyone practically a drone compared to his own (debatable) intelligence.

"Let me get this straight," he says, and sets down his cube of energon half-drunk. "You jumped to unspace, which you knew was deadly to stay in for too long, despite having no way to get back if Astrotrain was already gone."

Skywarp shifts in her seat awkwardly. "I'd have figured something out," she says. "I can teleport too, you know." Except in telling him about her restored warp drive, she kind of clued him in to the fact that her warp drive wasn't really working in the first place. Yeah, she still hasn't heard the end of _that_ lecture yet.

"Then, when you convinced him to leave unspace and were incapacitated by the broken trine bond, he was _so distracted_ over your welfare that he let the Other One escape," Thundercracker continues, ignoring her.

"That's on him, not me," she says. What, she's to blame for him letting down his guard?

"When you got shot he then fought off the Other One- literally _Megatron_ , but _more powerful_ \- in order to bring you back to this dimension."

"Oh come on, he probably just picked me up and flew," Skywarp says, but she can hear how feeble that sounds. From everything she's gathered even just escaping the Other Megatron is an accomplishment, and Astrotrain did it quickly enough to save her from a basically-fatal blow.

"Realizing that the medics would be busy with our Megatron, he went to the Autobots and paid for your repairs with his own multiverse drive ripped out of his chassis," he says, and she squirms because saying it like that sounds way more dramatic than it actually is, but she can't contradict him because it's technically true. Astrotrain probably just figured the Autobots wouldn't turn him away if he gave them a sob story, and really, it's not like the multiverse drive was something he's had for ages anyway.

"And once you _were_ repaired, you left without a single word," Thundercracker says, folding his arms over his chest and leveling her with his 'not mad, just disappointed' look. Totally ignoring the fact that she left so quickly because what was she going to do, wait around to give the Autobots even _more_ data about her outlier ability? Plus: sensor-blockers! She was demonstrably impaired. "And you're surprised that he was offended when the first time you commed him was an entire decacycle later asking if he wants to clang?"

She sort of cringes her way through a shrug. It really doesn't sound so good when he lays it all out like this. "I didn't think it was that big a deal?"

"Skywarp, you're an idiot," he says, and it would sting more but there's that familiar undertone in his voice, the one that implies she's _his_ idiot no matter what else. "Do you even know _why_ you went into unspace after him?"

"Because he was gonna vanish and didn't know, duh," she says easily. Sure, it's not exactly Decepticon protocol to run off on rescue missions, but it just... didn't seem fair to let him vanish, especially after he helped her with her own tricky situation.

Slowly, like he thinks he's making a point, Thundercracker says, "Even though you had no way of getting back yourself if he was already gone."

"I told you, I could have warped out!" she says.

He lifts an optical ridge in skepticism but says nothing.

"I mean, I was pretty sure," Skywarp mutters, even though she really was not sure, not at the time and not even now that her warp drive _is_ repaired at last. Unspace is horrible, connected enough to her native dimension for her trine bond to remain intact but at the same time totally disconnected, absolutely nothing like her own teleportation ability.

He continues saying nothing and Primus, she hates when he does this. Screamer will happily tell you in great detail exactly why he thinks you're being dumb, but Thundercracker somehow has a way of forcing you to spell it out yourself.

"Whatever," she says. "Not like I don't do stupid stuff all the time."

To her surprise, he lets it go. Shakes his head with an ex-vent and says, "Forget it."

Clearly it's not _really_ over, but Skywarp jumps on the chance to change the subject anyway.

She doesn't really know where Thundercracker was trying to lead her, why it seems important to him to dwell on the chain of events that led to her nearest brush with deactivation. And what's Astrotrain's reaction to any of it have to do with her? He's a grown mech, he can make his own choices.

"It's come to my attention that I should say 'sorry'," Skywarp says from the end of Astrotrain's berth, taking amusement at the way he lurches as he comes online, clearly startled by her unannounced presence in his berthroom at night. "And also 'thanks'."

"Skywarp?" he says, vocalizer slow with recharge despite his quick onlining.

"Duh," she replies. The lights are off, just the red glow of their bio-lights to illuminate the space, and his frame's heated the air slightly above the base's average temperature so it feels warm and close, strangely intimate.

Astrotrain's optics blink on and off, then he sits himself up with a muted clatter. He doesn't say anything though, just looks at her, his optics like search beams in the dark.

She scuffs her pede against the surface of his berth, the metal subpar but still soft enough not to mark up her finish. "Sorry," she says. "I didn't mean to leave you like that with the Autobots, I wasn't really thinking. And I didn't think before I commed you, either."

He nods slightly.

"And... thank you," Skywarp says, suddenly unable to look at him, even with so little light to see by. "I'd have deactivated for sure if you hadn't gotten help so quick. You even got them to fix my warp drive and I can't, I really can't, say how much that means to me." She darts a glance up at his faceplate, but looks away before she can begin to decipher whatever expression might be on it.

"I'm sorry I made you do all that but I'm not sorry I went into unspace after you," she says in a rush. "I'm glad I did it, I'm glad I didn't let you vanish."

He still doesn't say anything and she wonders what else she has to say, but then feels the tip of one massive digit delicately brush under her chin, tipping her helm up to look at him.

"Thank you for going after me," he says, a little slow and quiet. "I've never had anyone care enough about me to do something like that before."

She shifts her weight from leg to leg, wanting to say that he still doesn't have someone like that, she doesn't _care_ about him- but she can tell when she's lying to herself. The whole situation is deeply uncomfortable and she hates it. She cares about her trine, loves them down to the deepest particles of her spark, and that was always supposed to be enough for her. She never signed up to get attached to anybot else with even a sliver of that intensity and she doesn't like it, doesn't like the way her co-processor is churning away on emotions she refuses to name but are shades removed from 'friendship' no matter how she approaches it.

"Can we frag now?" she blurts out.

Astrotrain chuckles, that deep rumble she can feel vibrating through his whole chassis, shivering against her wingtips. "Come here," he says, and tilts his hand into a platform she can step on, if she wants.

She does want. He brings her up to the level of his helm and she still gets a thrill out of how much bigger than her he is, even if it makes some things awkward. Like kissing. She can't really lose herself in the slide of intake-on-intake the way she would with a partner more her size, but she can pepper his lips with kisses and nibbles instead, so much soft alloy for her to play with.

"What do you want?" Skywarp asks, because this is part of her apology and so she'll follow his lead.

"Show me your pretty little valve," he murmurs, digits already starting to stroke along her frame in the sort of clumsy caresses he's restricted to at this size. Not that it stopped him from overloading her with just those same touches once before, she remembers with a flush of charge.

She doesn't hesitate to slide open her modesty panel, valve not quite ready to go but heading there quickly, already limbering up her calipers and starting to lubricate. But she's standing, so the view isn't impressive at all, and she reluctantly stops gnawing on his lips to turn away from him and bend over at the waist, wings splaying out wide to catch what glimmers of light can be found. "Like this?" she asks, feigning innocence as her aft wiggles a little.

In answer Astrotrain flicks out his massive glossa and licks her, covering far more than just her exposed valve.

She squeaks, and immediately clamps a hand over her mouth as if that will disguise the noise. He doesn't say anything about it, though, just licks her again, and again. With each swipe she can feel his glossa getting smaller, the distance she's being held in the air shorter and shorter as he must be mass shifting down in size.

Eventually he's of a size compared to her frame that his intake can do more than just lick, his lips and glossa attacking her valve while his digits caress her chassis, the stimulation quickly bringing her charge levels up nearly to the point of overload already. He's apparently been paying far more attention to what she likes than she realized.

"I'm close," Skywarp tells him, unable to disguise the whine in her vocalizer because she assumes he'll pull away and leave her squirming on the edge while she tends to him instead.

But he just kind of hums, and tweaks the tip of one of her wings.

She moans, and when he repeats the action with her other wing she overloads, charge crackling through her circuits as pleasure swamps her. Astrotrain licks her through it, glossa reaching inside her valve like her lubrication is some rare treat he wants to consume, and finally moves his intake away when she starts to quiver from overstimulation.

"Want you on my spike," he says, and she nods her helm eagerly. He's behind her so she can't be sure of his size, but they've fragged enough that she's pretty sure he has an idea of her limits.

It's only a digit that enters her at first and Skywarp would be sorry, but even his digits are huge and thick. Two fill her up nicely, and a third has her moaning in anticipation, the mesh of her valve stretching hungrily around him.

"Come on," she can't help but coax him, needing his spike inside of her already.

"Impatient," he says, amused, and yup, _there's_ the teasing.

"Astrotrain," she whines, drawing out his designation in protest.

To her surprise instead of making her squirm from a lack of stimulation he twists the digits he has buried in her valve, his engine rumbling. "Say my designation," he tells her.

"Astrotrain," Skywarp says immediately, "Astrotrain, please, come on, Astrotrain-!"

He pulls his digits out and repositions her over his spike in one swift movement, hot slick metal meeting the soft rim of her valve. She gasps, and then moans his designation again when he uses his grip on her frame to push her down, his spike sinking into her valve in a wave of delicious, mesh-stretching pressure.

There's definitely no teasing from him now, just the hot slide of their arrays grinding together as he pushes in deep, her calipers struggling to even compensate for the stretch of his girth. "Like that?" he murmurs, and she doesn't care if it's another teasing statement about her impatience or if he's asking if enjoying it because _yes_ , yes she likes it.

She can't take his spike all the way to the hilt, pressure warnings popping up from her ceiling nodes with how hard she's trying to grind down, and she looks at him around her shoulder vent to say, "Want me to open up?"

"Open your subspace?" Astrotrain asks, and she nods. He groans, which sure as Pit sounds like agreement to her, but he says, "Hold on."

She pouts, and winces a little as he starts to move out from underneath her. But she catches on to what he's doing pretty quick and doesn't struggle as he lays her on the edge of his berth, not even when he flips her over so she's on her back instead of her front.

"Astrotrain, please," she says as he moves to stand besides the berth, laying it on a bit thick mostly to cover how much she really _does_ need his spike back inside of her, immediately.

"Yeah," he mutters, one hand on his spike to guide it between her spread thighs, "Yeah, I know."

Then he's pushing back inside of her, and she grabs at his forearms to brace herself while moaning at the feeling. He rocks back and forth, a few tentative thrusts, the size of his spike visible through the flexible arrangement of plating in her abdomen. She's decided that it's absolutely hot when that happens, loves that he's so big his spike has to make room and that her frame compensates, takes it.

Skywarp doesn't warn him before opening her subspace pocket, so that with one thrust he fills her valve and with the next he's sliding even deeper, farther inside of her than anyone outside of her trine ever has. She wails and rolls up against him, pulling him in deep so that each sensory node in her valve is stimulated and _then some_ , all those non-sensory feelings that come along with having her subspace played with crackling through her circuitry.

Frustratingly he keeps up a slower pace than she wants, gaining some speed as he falls into a rhythm but not nearly enough to match the intensity she's feeling from all angles. Her spark feels like it's literally vibrating inside the safety of the warp drive, not a shadow of discomfort but just a ringing sort of pleasure, like every nanometer of her sensornet is connected to her valve and her subspace and they're all begging for _more_ , frag it!

She's probably begging already, but Astrotrain just says, "Like this." And keeps up his slow and steady rhythm, which isn't even all _that_ slow but might as well be a turbo-snail's pace to her right now.

She squirms underneath him, but even without any weight resting on her frame she's basically trapped, wings scraping the berth and hands scraping for purchase on whatever of his chassis she can reach, legs stretched so far to encompass his frame between them that her HUD keeps alerting her to over-extension and possible dislocation of her hip joints. He isn't even touching her anterior node except when his pelvis pulls flush to her, and when she reaches down to rub it herself he grabs her hand, redirects her arms up over her helm and holds them with an effortless grip.

"Please," she whines because now she really is trapped, "Astrotrain, please, come on, I need it, please!"

"You look so good like this," he tells her, and she slits her optics open- when had she shuttered them?- to watch him run a digit down her front, from smooth cockpit to the swell of his spike inside of her. "Taking all of me so well."

All told Skywarp is pretty used to being complemented in berth. Seekers are clearly the most attractive frametype in general, duh, and she's always thought her paint scheme and the little distinctions of her design are striking. Plus, everyone says nice things while they're fragging, unless you signed up for not-nice things.

But the way he says it makes her feel all weird, exposed, especially with her hands stretched away from her frame so she can't really do anything to divert the attention somewhere else.

"You like the way I fill you," Astrotrain says, spike rolling deep, pushing inside her subspace. She moans an agreement. "Tell me," he says, and it comes out less like a command and something closer to a plea. "Tell me you like me inside you."

"I love it," she gasps out over the noises of their coupling, the creaks and clangs, the slick noises of her valve, the thrum of their cooling fans. "You feel so good in me, Astrotrain. So full, so deep! Astrotrain please, come on, I need you."

He lets out a strangled noise, and suddenly his measured pace breaks down into something far rougher, frantic. Skywarp keens and isn't surprised to overload quickly despite the lack of contact to her pulsing node, charge crackling off her frame in flickers of lightning, bright against the darkness of the room.

He doesn't pause, doesn't let up, and she screams his designation as she overloads again right on the heels of the first, spinal strut arching up off the berth, hips struggling to meet his.

"Overload for me," she says, not really wanting it to be over but seeing the signs in his frame that he's close anyway. "Mhm, come on, let go for me."

" _Skywarp_ ," he says, a strange kind of softness in his voice she really doesn't want to dwell on, the hand not keeping her arms pinned spreading out over her chassis reverently. "Close up, I wanna fill you."

She whines a little, doesn't want to lose the feeling of him in her subspace, but at least this will make for less cleaning later. When he draws his spike back out she pulls the opening to her pocket closed, so his next thrust in slams right up against her ceiling nodes again.

It kind of hurts, she wasn't prepared and he didn't adjust his stroke length to compensate either so it's a hard hit, but the sort of hurt that she doesn't mind in the moment. Astrotrain thrusts again and holds himself deep, grinding against her as he pumps out his usual absurd amount of transfluid.

Then it's silent and still, save for the frantic working of their cooling fans in his warm dark room. Skywarp savors the feeling he's giving her, pinned and filled and sticky with overflowing transfluid, the presence of his huge frame over hers with all that contained strength and power, and sighs when he pulls his spike back out at last.

She lets him have a moment before smiling up at him. "So, apology accepted?"

Astrotrain chuffs one of his rare laughs, optics half-shuttered, the smile curling up the ends of his lips just barely visible in the dim lighting. Instead of saying anything he dips his helm down and kisses her, and she figures that's answer enough in its own way.


End file.
